Monday, May 11, 2015

Stunted Stigma

I wrote a couple of writing tips about sex and how to include sexual scenes in your writing. I was asked in a personal email if I wrote any porn.

My response was from my teen-age years. I think it was my sophomore or junior year in high school when I mentioned to my dad that I was considering a life as an author... or a writing career. He sat me down and gave me his fatherly advice. His words, more or less:

Being a writer is a good trade but they don't make a lot of money. Sure there are some who make a real good living at it but, for more, it usually takes writing smut and porn, to make any type of living. If you want to write, my only request is - write what you would want or allow your mother to read.
WOW! Talk about stunting creativity. My days of being a porn writer were crushed. So long, big bucks and wild times.

Sure I continued to dabble in writing over the next 30+ years. My first submission to Children's Highlights was rejected. That was my junior year in high school and the stigma lasted for well over 30 years. I never really submitted anything again. Okay, I did submit a poem/story - after a lot of persuasion from friends - to a local rag in Washington, DC. It was accepted and I saw my name in print - or rather my nom de plume. I couldn't even bring myself to use my real name. It was a stupid poetic story about a boy who gets pigeon crap on his head and considers himself special until the his mother forces him to wash his hair.

Anyway, would I write porn or smut? No. Could I? Sure. Would it be good? Let's get real here. Like 98% of all porn flicks - is there really any plot or acting? Sure, the story would be good, but then again, the story might be more plot driven than sex driven. Would it really be porn anymore?

Why am I even considering this? I am not about to branch out into the erotica market. In fact, I can honestly claim that I haven't really read any hot-n-heavy erotica since my Navy days. And I read the classy stuff - Sexus, Nexus and Plexus by Henry Miller - all banned and, of course, a few of the more colorful books the other guys had brought into the barracks and/or on-board the ship.

No, I'm still creeping along under that stigma - Can my mother read this? And will I be proud of it? So I don't write in that genre.

Until my mother's death, she had read almost everything I had written, especially the last few books which she thought to be extremely weird. She never understood my love of science fiction, fantasy or horror. I do believe she would have really enjoyed my latest release: The Secret Voice. It is an Amish Christian novel. In fact, I think she would have enjoyed Pangaea, Eden Lost - a clumsy Indiana Jones type adventure.

Well, so much for writing porn and smut. Not my genre and I believe it will survive without me.

A little other updates. The garden. My tomatoes are looking great and with luck, I should be placing them into the garden in the next few days. My peas are breaking ground finally. Not sure why it took them almost 3 weeks to come up, but they are showing now. I have been "conditioning" the two bales of straw and another few days and they will be ready. So, in preparation of that, I hope to start the vine plants (cukes, zukes, melons) tomorrow in peat pots. Also plan to put out the corn, carrots, beets, beans and whatever other seeds my wife bought that she thinks we want to grow. My square foot gardening really pushes the limits.

We won't be going anywhere with the RV this week but will be prepping it for the following week. We plan to go out for a four day stay at the state park and make sure it can handle the rigors of a trip, just in case we decide we want to travel. Actually, I think we'll spend more time day-dreaming about the renovations we want to do - a complete revamp of the inside.

With the weekend being Mother's Day, we had all of the four boys show up to honor my wife, their mom. Four boys, four wives, 10 grandchildren and a couple of hopefully soon-to-be members. Plus my one granddaughter graduated, getting her Phlebotomy degree. A very active weekend.

9 comments:

LOLOL - she thought you wrote "a little weird." Welcome to my life. My father has been gone 10 years and I think he might have liked what I've recently written, but he read some of my stuff years ago that really needed work and I remember him saying this. "You know, it's not any worse than any of the other crap out there." Sigh... gotta love parents. (to be true, he was secretly proud of me - he'd always wanted to write a story and kept starting one and never finished. I think he was proud I actually did it - and possibly a wee bit jealous)

When my mother introduced herself to our new neighbor - I mean, the first day the neighbor moved in and my mother was staying with us that week - she informed the woman I wrote SF, fantasy and other weird stuff and had no idea why since I had been raised in a normal family. The other children were fine. Until then I'd never considered writing an affliction. LOL.

I tried writing some "smut" but couldn't bring myself to do anything with it and only allowed my editor to see a couple of paragraphs. Let's put it this way - I kept my day job and haven't tried since... except for those "steamy" scene I did for the writing tip one week.

When you stop to think about it, why do we have this idea that our parents or grandparents would be more shocked or hurt by reading sexually-related material than anyone else? It's just another sign of our society's squeamishness about sex.

As for my own writing, I leave it up to you and other readers whether my content falls into the smut, porn or erotica categories.

Having discovered the books that my father and mother read - now that they've passed - I quite sure anything I'd have written would have been fine. It is sort of like the concept - other parents have sex, but not my parents. I was conceived otherwise. LOL.

I just don't enjoy writing steamy scenes and if I don't like writing them, they are gone. I also don't write much violence. That's harder when I include a battle scene in one of my sci-fantasy. My mysteries tend to become "cozy" and my sci-fantasy is more concerned about relationships or surviving in a new environment.

I've been accused of being a tease - leading up to a possible encounter then letting it fade into the background. I prefer to go the old romance book way - He swooped her up, kicked open the bedroom door. The next morning... If the reader can't figure what happened in-between, well, then they don't need to know.

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About Me

Bob currently lives in NW Ohio on a quaint wooded acre with his wife. When not traveling, during the summer he putters around the yard and in the winter, he sits by windows and enjoys the wildlife in the snow. Spent 5 yrs in the Navy, speaks Russian (well, at one time) and enjoys cooking. And totally spends too much time on the computer.